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Supatra Sasuphan, 11, of Bangkok, was recently noted as the world's hairiest girl by the Guinness Book of World Records for her wolf-like facial hair as one of only 50 people in history to be recorded with hypertrichosis. Though she has of course been teased and taunted at school, she told a reporter in February that the Guinness Book recognition has actually increased her popularity at Ratchabophit school. [Daily Mail (London), 2-28-2011]

According to a team of University of Montreal psychologists, a 23-year-old man, "Mathieu," is the first documented case of a person wholly unable to feel a musical beat or to move in time with it. The scientists report for an upcoming journal article that Mathieu sings in tune but merely flails with his body, bouncing up and down much more randomly than do people who are merely poor dancers. [Science News, 3-26-11]

From the September 2010 issue of the journal Endoscopy, reported by three physicians at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia: A 52-year-old woman undergoing a routine colonoscopy was shown on the screen to have a cockroach in her traverse colon. A literature review revealed no previous cases of cockroaches (but, e.g., ants, wasps, bees). Though the cockroach was not welcome, the doctors acknowledged that in some other countries, they are delicacies. [Endoscopy 2010 (published 9-15-2010)]

Scientists Just Wanna Have Fun: A team of whimsical researchers at the University of Osaka (Japan) Graduate School of "Frontier Biosciences" has produced a strain of mice prone to "miscopying" DNA -- making them susceptible to developing sometimes-unexpected mutations, such as their recently born mouse that tweets like a bird. Lead researcher Arikuni Uchimura told London's Daily Mail that he had expected to produce, instead, a mouse with an odd shape, but the "singing mouse" emerged. Previously, the team produced a mouse with dachshund-like short limbs. [Daily Mail, 12-10-2010]